by Nikki Yeboah

It’s the holiday season. And to all my Afrocentrics, you know what that means: Kwanzaa! To all my non-Afrocentrics, a brief explanation: Kwanzaa is a week-long celebration that originated in Los Angeles during the Black Power Movement of the 1960s. (Not in Africa, as most people believe.) Dr. Maulana Karenga developed it, motivated by the desire to recover a lost sense of black identity through a uniquely African-American holiday tradition that would be rooted in African principles. Most African-Americans don’t even celebrate Kwanzaa, but go ahead and treat my use of Kwanzaa in this article as a stand in for any and all of the ways Black Americans celebrate their African roots in culturally suspect ways.

By Jaimee A. Swift

When I read Ms. Zipporah Gene’s article on how she felt that Black Americans need to stop culturally appropriating African culture, it struck more than a nerve – it actually brought me back to an interesting time where I battled with what seemed to be a missing part of myself.